Thursday, July 21, 2016

enet networking library

I switched over all the low-level networking in a VR app I've been working on to enet today. It's a UDP-based networking library that supports optional reliable and in order packet delivery, packet fragmentation (so very large packets can be sent over UDP), and multiple channels.

The API was super easy to use, the code is written in C, and the thing just works. Compiling it was as easy as dropping the .C files into the project and hitting Build.

About Me

Back in the day I worked for several years at Digital Illusions on things like the first shipping deferred shaded game ("Shrek" - 2001), software renderers, and game AI. Then, after working for Microsoft at Ensemble Studios for 5 years as engine lead on Halo Wars, I took a year off to create "crunch", an advanced DXTc texture compression library. I then worked 5 years at Valve, where I contributed to Portal 2, Dota 2, CS:GO, and the Linux versions of Valve's Source1 games. I was one of the original developers on the Steam Linux team, where I worked with a (somewhat enigmatic) multi-billionare on proving that OpenGL could still hold its own vs. Direct3D. I also started the vogl (Valve's OpenGL debugger) project from scratch, which I worked on for over a year. In my spare time I work on various open source lossless and texture compression projects: crunch, LZHAM, miniz, jpeg-compressor, and picojpeg.